


I've Found Me a Home

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester Angst, Happy Ending, I love my children but this is kinda sad, M/M, No Relationship, but you can look at it either way you want, its ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 22:12:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5308982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester has lost so many homes over the years that everything just blurs into one definite word that he bases his whole life off: temporary. He's lived his whole life in shadows, in dingy motels and if they were lucky, a hotel. But the hotels, the motels, they never stopped coming. Dean's tired of being a nomad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've Found Me a Home

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone! This was written for the spnwritingchallenge on tumblr, and the prompt was HOTEL.
> 
> Enjoy! It is my first fic without a ship.

**1979**

Mary Winchester carries her little boy to a quaint house in Lawrence, Kansas. The wallpaper is fresh, there's flowers in the garden and a smile on her husband's face, a smile which she'd never seen before, a tenderness to it that spoke of happy times. 

They carefully go upstairs, treading softly not to wake the sleeping child in her arms and they place him quietly into the brand new cot. 

The room is small, and cosy, with stuffed animals in the cot and wood trimming. On what would become the nightstand, a small stone statue of an Angel rests, smiling benignly at the family. 

"Angels are watching over you, my son," Mary says, before backing out of the room. "Goodnight, Dean Winchester."

Suddenly, in the corner of the room a bright light appears. It soon solidifies into a shape that resembles a human, but with six black and white wings that flare out behind it. It has no vessel at the present, and instead comes off as wispy smoke, the tendrils seeping from what slowly starts resemble a corporeal body. The inside of it glows softly, like a warm hearth. 

It looks down at the child beneath it and passes a ghostly hand through him, and a small Enochian symbol burns on the centre of the child's forehead. 

 _I'm yours,_  the Angel thinks, settling against the wall and watching the child intently.  _And you are mine._

This place, with it's wide backyard and comfortable features would soon be known to Dean Winchester as a home, something permanent, where he could come back to at the end of the day and know good things await, the embrace of a loving mother and the smile of a kind father, where he was taught to appreciate homemade baked goods and the smell of summer flowers in windowsills. 

This small place in Lawrence, Kansas was home. 

**1983**

Four years later, someone else came to the small house in Lawrence, Kansas cradled in Mary Winchester's arms. At the door was an eager four year old, excited and nervous to meet his little brother for the first time. 

Samuel Winchester had it all, he had a wonderful mother, a gentle father, and a brother that at four years old had already made up his mind to be the best damn big brother the world had ever seen. But he would never get to call this place home, never be old enough to understand that this house could contain a peace that would take him years to find again. 

Mary puts him down in Dean's old cot, smiling gently, a different Angel sitting on the nightstand. 

"Sleep well, Sam Winchester," Mary whispers, even as Dean pokes his head over the railings of the cot and mumbles it too. "Angels are watching over you."

Then it's Dean's turn. As she tucks Dean in, Dean gestures vaguely at the door and says, "play."

Mary laughs and ruffles his hair. "You can play with Sam tomorrow, okay? Now you have to go to sleep."

Dean hesitates for a moment before nodding, sinking down under the covers. Mary then sticks her head down under the bed before grinning at her eldest son. "I think the Angels scared the monster under your bed away," she says, standing up and dusting off her skirt. "You don't have anything to worry about."

Dean nods, smiling goofily, as Mary walks out of the door and turns out the light and the nightlight on. "Goodnight."

"Night mama," Dean waves. 

The Angel floats in the corner of the room and runs its fingers lightly over the wooden desk.

 _Your mother is right,_ it thinks as it adjusts the blinds so the light won't come through in the morning and wake him up. _I am watching over you. We have big plans for you, Dean Winchester. You're going to be legendary._

The sleeping boy knows none of this, but relaxes as though he's heard it all the same. Now, even at four, it is cemented in his mind. This is home, this is where he was safe, this is where he is loved. He doesn't ever want to leave. 

**1984**

Dean doesn't know where it all went wrong. He can still feel the scorching heat of the fire, burning and consuming and taking everything he's ever had and wanted. 

He misses his mother, the lemongrass smell of her, the constant waft of various pies and cakes that came off her clothes. He misses her smile, and her eyes, and the way her lips formed words. 

Sam's a year old now, he's small and tiny, but loud in his movements. Sometimes, he cries at night, searching for a comfort that was taken away from him. 

Dean gets up at those times, holding Sam in his arms the way his mother taught him and shushing him, afraid to wake his father up from his drunken stupor. Often, Dean cries with him. 

He isn't sure when home turned to sad motels and the smell of whiskey, cigarette smoke staining the sheets and filling his mind. He isn't sure when his dad, kind and gentle, became a machine, smelling like gunpowder and grease and feeling like the pain of a slap. He wants his home back, and he falls asleep to this mantra, Sam just inches away from him. He wants his home back. 

The Angel in the corner places its hands across Dean's forehead and sends him good dreams, something somewhere inside it feeling pangs of an unidentifiable emotion. It doesn't want it's charge to suffer like this, it doesn't want him to feel pain. But it's like this when an Angel gets assigned to a Hunter. Many give up on them, the work so stressful to keep them safe, and so many die where they shouldn't have, when they shouldn't have. The Angel's wings flare up in defiance. He won't fail his Hunter. He won't let him die pitifully. 

Dean Winchester is going to be remembered for millennium, and it is going to help him get there. 

**2001**

Dean's ears ring with the slam of a door. Sam's left for college, left him all alone, with his father and a shot gun and the pain in his heart. He made his small family his home, kept it in a locked box and let his father and his brother carry it with them so that he'd always have a home, no matter what crappy motel they're staying in at that time. 

His box lies smashed on the floor, open like Pandora's box, and Dean slams his fist into a mirror and yells hoarsely. 

It's the worst night of his life. Not even the fire compares to this, to losing the other half- the better half of himself. Without Sam, he's self-destructive, self-loathing, mean and angry. He lashes out at people when he doesn't want to and takes more risks- who cares if he dies? He's starting to think that maybe his father wouldn't even blink. Dean's home is gone. He's lost it twice now, but he won't make the mistake again. 

Now everything's just a hotel, just temporary, just a means for him to get his four hours of sleep and not smell like a raccoon that's been digging through the dumpster. 

Even when he meets Lisa Braeden, or Cassie Robinson, he reminds himself, "it's just a hotel, it'll always be just a hotel."

The Angel screams in frustration, as it eyes Dean sleeping precariously around the pieces of the mirror. It started to carefully pick out the small shards of glass from the wound that Dean missed after punching the mirror and rearranging his head so he doesn't wake up cramped the next day. 

It understands why this must happen, why Dean has to be broken before he can be great, but Dean's its ward, its charge, and it'll be damned before it sees Dean shattered like the mirror above him. It sends Dean dreams about a normal life and wraps its wings around him protectively, and stays there till the Hunter wakes. 

**2005**

Sam's breathing in the bed opposite him is jarring, the sound almost unfamiliar to him. Four years is a long time to be without someone.

Sam's changed so much over the years, his hair is longer and his eyes are darker, he's taller and smiles more readily. Something else that has changed is the ambiance between the brothers. It's no longer as close as it was, and Dean finds himself getting too carried away with having Sam back that he acts too close and pushes Sam away again. 

Having Sam return to him is almost as torturous as having him leave. 

Dean's box is still carried around with him, he treats the splinters with the utmost care, he wraps it up in cloth and keeps it safe, waiting for someone to glue it back together again. Waiting for someone to stop making everywhere, every relationship he's ever made feel like a hotel, so temporary that he forgets almost immediately. He almost takes it out, almost gives it back to Sam, but then they go back to Kansas and Dean sees what's become of his house, the only real home he's ever known, suddenly the box seems useless. The Impala, sitting outside in the carpark, was his home, but it was a lonely one, just him and miles and miles of road. White picket fence? Apple pie life? Impossible for someone like him. Impossible for someone with poison running through their veins. 

 

The Angel smooths Dean's hair when he sleeps and whispers Enochian words, hating that Dean was bottling himself up, hating that Dean could not know that at least someone out there loved him. 

**2007**

He's going to Hell. He should be scared, should be so nervous that he should be wanting anything in order to back out of his deal. But all he can feel is a strange sense of inner peace- Hell is something permanent, and he'll get what he deserved for ruining his family's life, for killing his dad. Hell is not a hotel. 

He can sense his brother's exasperation at this, this nonchalance, but he feels good, he loves that his brother is frustrated. 

After all, it would make it easier when he died. Sam wouldn't care anyway- he'd live his life and find a nice girl and have a kid and maybe if it was a boy he'd name it Dean, the nostalgia killing him inside, but then he'd move on and die at the age of eighty chugging Viagra and beer simultaneously. That's the kind of life Dean had always wanted for his brother. Not this one, stained with gunpowder and tainted with constant tension, always spoiling for a fight. 

He stares up at the ceiling and smiles. He'd fix everything by going to Hell.

The Angel is up in Heaven and it is angry, shouting at its superiors, "you said he was to be immortal, he wasn't supposed to end like this!"

They smile and shake their heads and say, "Big plans. Big plans, you wouldn't understand. Big plans."

The Angel wants to kill them all. 

**2008**

Dean tastes the dirt of the grave he's in and then he's pushing out of it, his father having taught him how to do it when he was fourteen by burying him alive. The heat of the sun hits him at full blast, and his eyes take a second to readjust- and what he sees looks like a battlefield. 

"Shit," he says, then realises those would be his first words alive again. "Shit," He repeats. 

Hell wasn't supposed to be a hotel, it wasn't supposed to be temporary, how dare he, Dean Winchester, who'd done things that made war criminals look mild, be able to breathe fresh air and see the sun and the blue of the sky, how  _dare_ he?

The Angel walks beside him, now clothed in a vessel, unused to having so little limbs and be corporeal. It- he, it guesses now. He guides Dean toward a semi-abandoned convenience store, where he watches with pride as Dean reveals its mark. The hand print on Dean's arm was not accidental. It was the only way that Dean's soul would stay tethered to the Angel in chaos that was Hell, and so he'd burned his hand onto Dean, the warm hearth that was within suddenly flaring like a volcano. 

No one had come back from Hell before, but standing before him- his ward, his charge, the man who would shake the world, he felt an immense amount of pride and love towards the one he'd cared for since forever. 

And that, the Angel assures Dean silently, was permanent. 

**2009**

The room was painfully dull, and the exquisite features only heightened Dean's anxiety and anger.To think that Angels, what were harmonious and docile creatures, would want to create mass murder for a utopia that might not happen. Dean could feel the wrath inside, swirling and bubbling, and finally he couldn't stand it anymore and tipped over a statue of an Angel, only to find it reappear just as it was. 

This made him even angrier, and he spent a whole hour trashing the room, smashing the bottles that were on the table, breaking through the walls with pieces of shattered furniture, until his knuckles were red and screaming and the place looked like a war zone. There's a small puff, and suddenly Dean's healed and the room is as pristine as it was, and Dean wants to scream in frustration. 

He hears the rustle of wings and turns around to see his guardian Angel, Castiel. Castiel is looking at him with a detached interest and anger, as though he hates what he has to do and so separates himself from the world. 

Castiel wants to reach out- past the confines of this human form, to his smoke and vapour stage with his wings at their greatest and just hold Dean, but somehow that urge has been repressed, and now he merely looks at Dean with the sort of interest you would look at a commercial. "We've been through much together, you and I. And I just wanted to say, I'm sorry it ended like this," Castiel says, his hands twisting the ends of his coat into knots. He shouldn't be this affected. Dean was his ward. Dean  _is_ his ward. There is nothing new. 

Before him, Dean visibly swells with anger, and his next words are, "sorry?" There is suddenly a fist flying at his face, but Castiel makes no move to stop it. It wouldn't hurt him either way. Dean winces and shakes his hand, the punch affecting him more than it did Castiel. "It's Armageddon, Cas. You need a bigger word than sorry."

Castiel sighs and tries to remember what his superiors told him. "Try to understand Dean, this is long foretold. This is your-"

"Destiny?" Dean snorts, and crosses his arms. "Don't give me that "holy" crap. Destiny, God's plan... It's all a bunch of lies, you poor, stupid son of a bitch! It's just a way for your bosses to keep me and keep you in line! You know what's real? People, families- now that's real. And you're gonna watch them all burn?"

His words hit Castiel like bullets, touching ever exposed nerve. He's seen the beauty in this world, the free will, the sounds of music. The colours- Castiel would never tire of the colours. But there was also pain, and misery, and so much suffering. He thinks about Dean with Sam, the longing and the wrath and the heartache and thinks who could want to live there? "What is so worth saving? I see nothing but pain here. I see inside you. I see your guilt, your anger, confusion. In paradise, all is forgiven. You'll be at peace."

"You can take your peace," Dean seethes, "and shove it up your lily-white ass. Cause I'll take the pain and the guilt. I'll even take Sam as is. It's a lot better than being some Stepford bitch in paradise. This is simple, Cas! No more crap about being a good soldier," Dean smashes yet another porcelain Angel and watches the powder litter the floor. "There is a right and there is a wrong here, and you know it."

Castiel's face falls and he looks away. 

Dean wants to say so many things. He wants to tell Castiel he's stopped searching for a home but he wish he has not, that sometimes when he thought of a home he thinks of a house with a red front door and Castiel and his brother inside. He wants to tell Castiel that he doesn't want to be a hotel anymore, for people to lay their baggage on and let him bear it. 

Instead he rears up all his anger and lets it all out, damaging and therapeutic at the same time. "Look at me!" Dean roars.  

The Angel wishes he could. 

**2011**

"There's one more thing you could do for me," and Dean's voice cracks on the last word. Castiel stops and looks at him, a puzzled expression on his face. 

"And what's that, Dean?"

"Lisa and Ben- could you," Dean is gasping now, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "Erase their memories of me?"

Castiel sucks in a breath. "Why would you want that?"

"Because I'm poison!" Dean shouts hoarsely, looking down at his hands with hatred. "Look at me, Castiel, and tell me you see someone who has not destroyed everything he ever touched, who has not hurt everyone he loves! Tell me!"

"They are your home," Castiel says placatingly. "Surely they'll understand."

Dean deflates. "They will understand, but they will never be safe. Never, not while I'm alive- hell not even when I'm dead. They'll never be safe, and family is about sacrifice, right? Do this for me, Cas. Please."

 _You should've reminded yourself it was just a hotel, Dean,_ his mind whispers traitorously. _You should have never gotten attached._

Dean nods vigorously as Castiel opens the hospital room door and steps inside. "You're right," he says. "You're absolutely right."

**2012**

The crunch of leaves beneath their feet is the only thing they hear today, and while that would bring a sigh of relief it makes Dean more anxious and jumpy. Benny is scouting the perimeter, so he's walking with Castiel today, the Angel a comforting and reassuring presence. 

They walk for a while in silence before Castiel breaks it, putting his hand on Dean's shoulder and saying softly, "when we get back, there's something I would like you to do."

"What's that, Cas?"

"Get a proper house," Castiel smiles. "With a red door and flowers and wooden panels, and all the things you and Sam love."

"Why would you want me to do that?" Dean asks, mystified. "You know a house doesn't work out for me. It never has. We're better off sticking to hotels or cheap motels we can stay in."

Castiel hums in acknowledgment, dancing lightly over a tree root. "But a house makes everything more stable and comforting," he says. "I would like a house to come back to if I were human."

Dean rolls his shoulders. "If we get a house, you're always welcome, Cas."

Castiel frowns slightly. "Dean, I don't want you to feel temporary anymore," and when Dean tries to reject the notion he's ever felt that way Castiel actually snarls and glares at him. "You think you can lie about your feelings to me? The one who watched you before you were born and after you were, and will watch you until the day you die, and then some? You think I haven't known every single time you've felt like a wisp of smoke, threatening to blow away from spending too much time in dingy cabins or cheap hotels, hiding away from everyone? Things change when we get out of Purgatory, Dean. Things change for good."

Dean's mouth is slight ajar. "Cas-"

"Don't you _Cas_ me," he seethes. "You promise me."

**2013**

Dean followed Castiel's advice. It's not a house with a white fence and a red door, it's a bunker, the Bunker, it's got books and a workable kitchen and amazing shower pressure and beds that are so soft you feel like you're floating on a cloud. 

Dean's never really felt like he had a home anywhere. But Sam's come back to him, they're close again, two halves reunited. He's remade his box, but now he buries it- not just with Sam, but inside the Men of Letters bunker. He puts Sam and Castiel, his Angel, inside, before lightly closing the box and keeping it within his heart. He can hear Sam moving about downstairs- he's made it his goal to read all the books in the Bunker by the end of the year, and as endearing as it is, it is rather annoying when at 3 am you can hear Sam going, "NO WAY! THAT'S HOW IT'S CURED?" To which Castiel will reply, "I knew that," in a sulky tone with crossed arms. 

He has a home now. He has his own mattress- memory foam, it remembers him, something that Dean still finds completely novel. He's got an amazing vinyl and a photograph of his mother and him on the table, and his favourite guns are all hung up above his bed. 

Granted, it's no apple pie home- sometimes Sam yells and Dean knows he's accidentally gotten cursed for a day or two by opening a book without the correct password, sometimes someone attempts to invade the Bunker, sometimes someone does invade the Bunker, but it's as good as a home he's got. 

It's permanent, the bunker old and wise and sturdy, it feels like Dean. Abandoned and alone, but now not so much. Not anymore. 

This was all he ever wanted. His brother, his best friend, and a place to call his home, where he could come back to and know that Castiel would not judge him for what he had done and that Sam would be there with a small smile and a "you alright" even if Sam was the one in pain. 

He thinks he could get used to calling a place home instead of hotel, always wandering, drifting

The nomad finally has a home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Hope y'all enjoyed.


End file.
